High Fashion Meets Small Town (Abigail’s Unique Session)

It’s not everyday that one of your friends calls and says, “Will you help me trash my wedding dress?” That’s pretty close to what my friend Abigail said to me after she heard about a session we did near her house in Pine, Arizona where we took a bride into a motorcycle parts yard, a creek, and a pile of fall leaves (all in her old wedding dress) to get some BEE-autiful model looking shots!

Ever since she heard about that session, Abigail (who’s been married 5 years) has been dreaming up her own Radiant Unique Session!

(This is her dreaming up her session… ha ha).

She lives in Northern Arizona and she is very partial to her small town so we wanted to keep her around that area and really capture her loving the beauty she lives for.

At heart, Abigail is a good ‘ole country girl…

…however, she also appreciates elegance and the art of fashion to some degree as well….

… which is why I LOVE the photos that combine the 2!

You can’t beat cowboy boots, a stunning wedding dress, and an old rusty bus (thanks to Mr. Man in Pine who let us pose with his bus!). Not to mention, a cowboy hat with silver stilettos make a statement like none else!

(To get this shot, we all sat in the truck waiting until the last raindrop fell…. then we shouted “go!” and clamored out of the truck with gear piled in all of our arms to get this shot as quick as possible before the rain came back. Hey, it worked!)

Abigail is one of those rare people who really does appreciate the small things in life (unlike most of us who just TRY to notice and love those things) and the big things she cares about are the things that help other people and improve the world around her. In other words she is a very caring, very awesome, beautiful, intelligent, thoughtful, woman with a variety of interests! So our job…. to capture all of that in a few photos!

There is no way I could make it through this blog without talking about a few water mishaps. Here’s the story… you have shirtless Scottie carrying the bottom of a wedding dress (to keep it from getting wet at the wrong time), holding his camera in the air with his other hand, all while praying he doesn’t fall! Camera insurance is nice, but it’s not really something we’re excited to test out or anything! (By the way, he did stumble once and pulled one of those arms swinging like propellers – almost fall maneuvers… and apparently the propeller arms did the trick because he stayed up!) All that to get over to this mini waterfall with her dress still intact!

Abigail was oh so brave throughout the whole thing! That first step into the water was a tough one, everything in you just screams “NO!!! What are you doing?! You have a wedding dress on and that’s not a creek-friendly outfit! ” It’s a very counter-intuitive thing to do and I could see the inner struggle in her face as she put her first foot in! It’s like watching $100 bills fly out the window! Although by the end of it all, her dress was totally fine, it just needed to be dry cleaned and it would be good as… almost new!

(It was right about this time that it was hard to believe we were still in Arizona! When you think the southwest, you don’t usually picture turquoise colored water! So for all you east coasters who think people in Arizona still ride to work on horses, bathe in tiny puddles of any muddy water we can find, and have front yards made out of tumble weeds…. now you know that’s all a lie (or at least the part about the desert not having water is)!)

This picture takes me right back to 5 years old when I dreamed of being a fairy princess in a fairytale forest (the kind without goblins in it of course), surrounded by tiny talking animals. But as we all know, fairytales are make-believe… or at least I know that now after being in that forest and realizing it was full of GIANT spiders that crawl in the layers of her dress, rocks that cut your feet, and sticks that tangle up your hair! Of course Abigail totally embodies the modern day fairytale where the princess is excessively brave and can take on major social issues that are much bigger than a few little ‘ole spiders! So I guess it still works. (I was seriously stifling my screams as I saw quarter sized spiders all stuck up in her dress and she just calmly brushed them away and kept laying there).

One of the best things about this session was that Abigail decided to have her husband dress up for some shots so that she could get a few pictures that she feels like she missed on her actual wedding day. We really like the idea of helping people re-create their wedding years later so they can get some great, modern looking pictures that they love (which works great if you had a poodle perm back in the day that makes you too embarrassed to show your wedding pictures or something like that)! That’s why we offer the Unique Session as an item separate from our actual wedding packages, so that anyone (no matter how long ago you got married) can take advantage of a chance to have Radiant wedding pictures… and to give every girl a chance to be a bride again!

We also offer Unique Sessions in our Unique Wedding Package to give our couples a chance to relax on their wedding day and spend time with their guests rather than spending an hour or more doing pictures after the ceremony. Plus Unique Session pics turn out way better than actual wedding day ones because we have more control over lighting, time of day, setting, etc.

Thank you soooo much Abigail (and Andy) for giving us the chance to go out and get creative with our art. This was such an unforgettable time for us and we are so glad we got to experience it with such good friends! Thanks for trusting us to do this…and believing us that it would be worth getting your dress a little dirty! Thanks for not giving us funny looks when we asked you to do awkward poses or sit in front a dirty bus…. we hope you now get to see what we saw in those moments! Oh yeah and most of all, thanks for not screaming and freaking out when there were spiders in your dress… I would’ve started crying. ;-) Love you both!